Microsoft offers free services to startups

Microsoft is offering free development tools and discounted application hosting to select startups — an arrangement the company hopes will improve its relationship with the startup community at large.

If a startup gets through three years, the company graduates into Microsoft’s standard software licensing program and will pay associated fees. Startups will be recommended by a set of Microsoft partners. The startups have to be private, less than three years old and have less than $1 million in revenue in order to participate.

As part of the program, called BizSpark, startups get a broad set of development tools to build applications, including Visual Studio and .NET.

The companies will also be able to use Microsoft’s Windows Azure, which was announced last week. Azure is designed to make it simple for developers to create programs that run on remote servers and are then accessed via Web browsers, cell phones or PDAs.

… BizSpark, is expected to make it easier for Microsoft to compete against Google and other Web rivals with its nascent cloud computing strategy, which was announced last week, and makes it easier for startups to work with Microsoft …

“It’s been my idea for a long time that we work toward this program,” said Dan’l Lewin, hired by Microsoft seven years ago to improve relations between Microsoft and Silicon Valley. “This is my baby.”